TWO KINDS OF TIME

by Graham Peck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 24, 1950

Controversy will be stimulated by this long personal account of conditions in China during the last decade. Graham Peck, the author, was first a free-lance writer in China, then during the war years a member of the O.W.I. staff and following the Japanese surrender again a free-lance writer. Never in any important official position during all this time, he was a keen observer, a warm-hearted lover of China and a rapid traveller into its most remote parts. He calls his books a ""condemnation of the Kuomintang Government based on years of living under its rule"". He is definitely not a communist, his closest sympathies and friendships seem to lie with members of the Cooperative Movement, and the Young Democrats, but he is no blind partisan of these; his severest criticisms are levelled at the blindness of American policies based on sentimental ideas about China rather than real facts. The book is long, sprawling, chaotic, not brilliantly written, but nevertheless rewarding to the patient reader, for it seems to reflect not one China, but the many Chinas of which that harassed country in the throes of a convulsive revolution is made up. Mixing trivialities, anecdotes, description, irritation and penetrating criticism, Peck at least shows that China cannot be grasped in a glance of the eye. Undoubtedly Peck would be labelled a dangerous Red by McCarthy -ites. Still less doubtful is the fact that he is one of those liberals who has been moved by the plight of China's millions exploited by a small group of their own countrymen. The unfortunate point of this book is that it appears after the Korean situation, instead of before. China students take note. Scholars and historians as well. Not a book of primary importance, but one that casts many side-lights.

Pub Date: Oct. 24, 1950

ISBN: 0295988525

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1950

Categories: NONFICTION